Stratification on the Menu: Using Restaurant Menus to Examine Social Class(Naliyah blog 4)

By Wynne Wright & Elizabeth Ransom
Teaching Sociology Vol. 33, 2005 (July:310-316)

I chose to report on this article because I was interested in finding a good class exercise for my teaching assignment. I decided to do something related to social class and thought this was a very interesting way to look at and discuss such a concept. The authors believe that over the past two decades food has increasingly become an indication of “social class and cultural capital for a growing number of Americans.” They cite the numerous cooking shows, channels, and books that have become popularized in recent times. The point of the article is to outline a class exercise where students are given menus from various food venues and asked to rate the social class they believe the restaurant caters to based on the following questions:

“1. Are the prices easily accessible to a wide population?
2. Does the menu assume specialized knowledge (e.g., sauces, wines, foreign languages)? (i.e., cultural capital)
3. Are there numbered entrees or easy-to-read food names? How many entrees are offered?
4. Are photos of the food used or does the menu use other artistic images?”

The authors said their goal was for students to understand how restaurants (“everyday taken-for-granted institutions”) expose differences in class and to teach students how to identify such differences “through the analysis of culturally representative artifacts.” This is a really important activity because it makes students think about how things they never viewed as “class-based” or as discriminatory may actually be (in the way that they are set up). It can be a great activity to lead into talking about class inequality, class- consciousness, race, ethnicity and class, or the institutionalization of discrimination. It is an activity that can be using to begin a variety of discussions and/or introduce various concepts.

This is an exercise which is interesting and with which everyone can relate. We all eat food and we choose the food we eat based on different things, one of which is price. In our respective teaching fields it is important to pull in activities like this which are interesting, fun, and a little out of the ordinary. Such exercises reign in the student’s interest in the beginning because they are not the average class work, which then makes it much easier to convey important conceptual and theoretical information.